MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE, Ala. -- A military installation loses power. A communications network goes down. A drone appears over critical infrastructure.
The response doesn't belong to the military alone.
Local officials, utility providers, emergency managers, law enforcement agencies and military leaders may all find themselves working the same problem, often under pressure to restore services, protect resources and keep operations moving.
That's the challenge a group of majors and senior civilian leaders examined during a recent homeland defense initiative at Air University's Air Command and Staff College.
The effort focused on a reality military leaders increasingly face: disruptions outside an installation can have direct effects on operations inside it.
Every day, military installations rely on power, water, transportation systems, communications networks and emergency services. Most of the time, those connections operate quietly in the background. When they're disrupted, commanders may be required to coordinate across multiple organizations while continuing to accomplish the mission.
"As we were thinking about how do we educate our students for the challenges that they'll face upon graduation, to help build the expertise and the competence and the skills necessary to really be the most effective at homeland defense, we were evaluating where we had some strengths and where we had some gaps," said Col. Benjamin Hatch, commandant of Air Command and Staff College.
Hatch said one of those gaps involved helping leaders better understand how military installations fit within a broader network of organizations, infrastructure and services.
"What we recognized, I think very clearly, is that gap," Hatch said. "We needed to find a way to educate those who would be at the installation level, working on those power projection platforms, those military installations."
To address that challenge, Air University brought together military professionals and outside experts in emergency management, governance, public safety and infrastructure planning. Discussions focused on the organizations, responsibilities and decisions that often come into play when military and civilian organizations respond to the same event.
Participants examined scenarios involving cyberattacks, infrastructure disruptions, terrorism and drones. Rather than focusing on a single threat, the discussions explored how organizations communicate, coordinate and respond when critical systems are affected.
One exercise placed participants in the middle of a coordinated drone attack affecting military and civilian infrastructure. Teams identified vulnerabilities, assessed available resources and developed response options while balancing mission requirements with impacts across the surrounding community.
"The exercise received some incredible positive feedback," Hatch said. "It was a scenario centered on a drone attack and then kind of examining how do you prepare for that, what would you need beforehand if you don't have it already, and then also how do you respond."
Participants also discussed cyber threats and the effects attacks against utilities, transportation systems and communications networks can have across multiple organizations.
The conversations frequently returned to a common question: How do organizations operating under different authorities and responsibilities work together when facing a shared problem?
For Hatch, the initiative provided an opportunity for participants to consider how they might approach those challenges in future assignments.
"Homeland defense is one that we did see that we had an opportunity to take a cohort of students and give those who are going to be going off to their next assignments an opportunity to think through more critically how they might support the security of our nation," Hatch said.
Many of the officers and civilians who participated will soon move into assignments across the Department of the Air Force and the Joint Force. Some will advise commanders. Others will serve on staffs or work alongside civilian agencies and community partners.
"Our approach to educate our majors and our senior civilians for the roles that they'll take upon graduation is to give them really some exposure to those civil-military relationships," Hatch said.